1. Field of the Invention
The invention relates to the telecommunications, and more particularly to a telephone set modified to serve as a terminal for use in making telephone purchases.
2. Description of Related Art
When customers utilize a telephone to place orders from retailers, such as catalog or shopping channel companies, a significant portion of the customer's time is used to provide information that is not directly related to the item(s) they wish to purchase. With every order, the customer must provide or verify their name, address, phone number, credit card number and expiration date. Having to repeat this information with each order presents a significant disincentive to a potential customer's participation in phone-order shopping. Retailers incur added costs by having to gather such information verbally and repeatedly. Similarly, many non-retail transactions require consumers to provide portions of the same information or other information such as Social Security number, business phone number, and date of birth. In an era where improved customer satisfaction, increased efficiency and cost reduction are goals of both business and governments these systems are inappropriately wasteful.
Voice response systems have been developed to reduce a retailer's costs. These systems present a verbal menu of the options available with instructions as to which key on the telephone keypad to press to activate a particular option. In addition, some systems prompt users for relevant data (almost always numeric in nature) such as checking account number, credit card number, date of birth and Social Security number in order to provide the user with specific information about his account. These systems require the user to navigate long sequences of commands to retrieve or enter the necessary information. Sometimes, unclear instructions frustrate the user or the system does not have options the user wants. While some systems offer a menu choice which permits the user to speak with a person, that feature is often only available during business hours and is hence of limited usefulness.
Other voice response systems recognize very simple voice commands, but for other information, such as a user's name or address, the system merely records the information as it is spoken by the user for later transcription. The process of recording and transcription is inherently error-prone: the user may leave out critical information, the recordings may be of such poor quality that the information is effectively lost, or the transcription step itself may introduce errors and/or misinterpretations.
“Smart” cards are known which store a wide variety of information in digital format. Such cards incorporate memory, one or more microprocessors, software, and an interface to allow data transfer between the card and external devices.
Credit or debit cards are known for automated financial transactions. By using a digitally-encoded magnetic strip which contains the user's name, account number and a password, the user is afforded access to computer networks by having the card “read” by a machine. This technology is well-defined and standardized throughout the commercial world.